The Best Advisor You Can Hire Would Hire Herself, Too

The best advisor you can hire will be a clever and a creative problem solver who interacts with you with total integrity, honesty, and ethical conduct. The worst? Someone’s goal of growing richer and richer at your expense- and that’s one of the better scenarios. Frankly, not all advisors, regardless of their reputations or press releases, are excellent, and some should simply not be trusted.

Lawyers, in particular, run the gamut. Here’s a thought: Unlike Caribbean medical schools that have many U.S. students, U.S. wanna-be lawyers don’t need to find Caribbean-equivalent law schools. The point being that although many college graduates do not get into a U.S. medical school, few, if any graduates of a four-year college, cannot get into a U.S. law school.

The moral of the story is that an advisor in whom you place your trust should be smart (something that cannot be guaranteed by having graduated from law school), honest enough to be worthy of your trust, and both insightful and perceptive enough about human behavior to merge book smarts with life experience to generate wise advice.

Frankly, not all advisors, regardless of their reputations or press releases, are excellent, and some should simply not be trusted.

Lawyers (to make a generalization) are harder working, more honest, and at least as intelligent, clever, forthright, and dedicated as those who populate the other professions. Do you know how to spot the good ones and avoid the not-so-good ones? To do so, you need to be an educated consumer of professional services to get the most out of your professional service providers.

Why Hire a Trusted Advisor?

Unless you are accused of a serious crime, you can probably live your life without needing to hire a lawyer. You can probably also avoid hiring an accountant all the days of your life. As with the work of plumbers and electricians and roofers, you can DIY those things if you are so inclined. No one is stopping you.

Similarly, if you think doctors are too expensive, or scare you, you are perfectly free to ignore your high temperature, your severe headaches, or the strange lump under your skin. Many people do just that. It’s true-some of these conditions will go away without anyone’s help. Not all, but some.

If you are a business owner or C-level executive or if you have complex financial issues, then it becomes less easy (and less smart) to go it alone. Ultimately, there are three basic reasons to find the best advisor you can hire and shell out for their services:

They have information or skills that you don’t;

Their help, advice, creativity or skill is worth the price that you will have to pay;

They can do something that you’d prefer not to do yourself or realize that you cannot do as well or as efficiently.

Playing the Hand You’re Dealt

Keep in mind when dealing with lawyers, accountants, and other trusted advisors that they must, simply stated, play the hand they are dealt. The legal system is complicated, time-consuming, and expensive- and sometimes you are too. Accountants often have to deal with tax rules that are unnecessarily complex. Indeed, this is the very reason why people go to school for a long time to enter these professions and are paid well to practice them! The best advisor you can hire won’t come cheap. “You get what you pay for” couldn’t ring more true.

Sy Syms Said it Best: “An Educated Consumer is our Best Customer”

Yes, the best advisor you can hire will take appropriate shortcuts when practicable and not overly risky. But practicable is not the same as possible and unless you are educated enough about the matter at hand, second-guessing your advisor can be dangerous. Getting good service and thoughtful advice from your trusted advisor requires that you to be realistic about whether your goals can be reached without taking undue risk regarding seriously bad consequences.